New York|Public Records: Personal Information on New York City Voters Is Now Available for All to See

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Public Records: Personal Information on New York City Voters Is Now Available for All to See

The city’s Board of Elections posted its voting rolls to its website, allowing anyone to access people’s home addresses and party affiliation.

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City officials said the voter information they published online was already public record. Still, the move raised alarms among privacy advocates and some election experts. CreditCreditHolly Pickett for The New York Times

Are you registered to vote in New York City? If so, then anyone can find out your party affiliation, full name and home address down to the apartment number — all with a few mouse clicks.

The city’s Board of Elections recently posted its voter enrollment lists to its website, a massive upload of thousands of pages, covered in tiny all-caps letters, that offer a district-by-district breakdown of voters sorted by party and street name — one line for each of the 4.6 million active registered voters.

City officials said that the information was already public record, and that a new forum did not change its availability. But the move raised alarms among privacy advocates and some election experts, who said the ease of access could play into the hands of mail scammers, internet trolls and domestic violence perpetrators.

“The New York City Board of Elections’ decision was theirs to make, but we believe sensitive voter information should always be protected,” Caitlin Girouard, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cuomo, said in a statement. She added, “When it comes to the current administration, we need to be extra vigilant to ensure New Yorkers’ information isn’t being used for politically motivated ill will.”

In New York, anyone can request comprehensive voter data from the state or local Board of Elections, which usually provides the information on a compact disc. Political parties have long used the information to target their fliers, phone calls and door-knocking campaigns.

But Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a privacy advocacy group, said there was a “big difference” between information that is technically public as a matter of law, and functionally and immediately available to anybody who wants it.

“It would be incredibly easy for anyone and everyone to simply take those documents and use them for whatever purposes they want,” he said.

North Carolina and Ohio make their data freely available for download on public sites, according to Michael McDonald, an associate professor at the University of Florida who runs The Election Project, which tracks election law across the country. Washington, D.C., published its voter rolls online in 2016, but after backlash, the law was revised and the elections board there discontinued the practice.

Most jurisdictions will release voter data only after a request from someone who must give their name and contact information, or will give the data only to certain groups, such as political parties. Some charge a nominal fee.

That may be a low bar for access, but it is an important one nonetheless, said Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, an assistant professor at Fordham University who studies digital media and political campaigns.

“Then you can ask for somebody’s email, and it provides some record of them doing this that we might think would stop misuse,” she said.

New York City began posting the files online in February, after the State Legislature passed a sweeping package of election reforms that included moving the state primary election date up to June, to coincide with the federal one.

That also changed the date by which state law required the city Board of Elections to publish voter enrollment books, and the city did not have enough time to get books printed by the new deadline, according to Michael Ryan, the board’s executive director.

Uploading the files digitally was intended to be a stopgap measure while the books were printed, in case candidates were trying to canvass in the meantime, Mr. Ryan said.

“It’s done as a one-off to meet this particular deadline,” he said. “We will address this matter with the commissioners to determine if it’s something that we will continue moving forward.”

The information posted online does not include voters’ gender, date of birth, phone number or email address, though that information is available for a fee if requested.

“You as a citizen or a group could come to our office, request an entire voter list, and get much more information than this,” Mr. Ryan said. “I don’t share the criticism that it makes a difference where you make it available.”

The information online is organized by State Assembly district, county and political party affiliation. It is divided into disparate PDF files, but it is searchable: Opening the Republican Party list from the 73rd Assembly District and searching for Trump revealed five names: Mr. Trump; his wife, Melania; his ex-wife, Ivana; and two of his children, Donald J. Trump Jr. and Tiffany.

Survivors of domestic violence can ask to be removed from public voter rolls. Still, that requires proof, in the form of a court order in the county where the survivor is registered to vote. That can be prohibitive, Professor Baldwin-Philippi said.

John Conklin, a spokesman for the State Board of Elections, said the state did not have plans to post its voter rolls online. No other jurisdiction in the state has done so, he added.

“I would say it’s unusual what New York City did, but I take it at face value that they did it for a good reason,” he said.

Assemblyman Charles Lavine, a Democrat from Long Island who heads his chamber’s elections committee, defended the city’s decision, though he acknowledged that many people do not know their voting data is public record.

And given heightened anxiety about personal privacy in the digital age, he said, the state could consider expanding the reasons for which voters could ask to be removed from the public rolls.

“It’s a new world, and we may have to look at providing protections for other members of the public to be able to guard their privacy for some good reason,” he said.

Correction:April 26, 2019

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the given name of President Trump's first wife. It is Ivana, not Ivanka.

Vivian Wang is a reporter for the Metro Desk, covering New York State politics in Albany. She was raised in Chicago and graduated from Yale University. @vwang3

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: City Board of Elections Posts Voter Rolls Online, Alarming Activists. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe